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After extending the series with Sunday's win, the New York Knicks lost Wednesday to the Miami Heat, losing the series in five games and making it 12 straight seasons since last winning a playoff series.

The winless stretch is the second-longest in Knicks franchise history, succeeded only by a 15-season span from 1954-68.

Sunday's win only seemed to temporarily stave off the inevitable. It was a series almost entirely dominated by the Heat.

In their four losses, the Knicks lost each by double digits and were outscored by a combined 70 points. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the negative 14-point average scoring margin is New York's second worst in a best-of-7 playoff series in postseason history.

The Knicks struggled to move the ball in Game 5, recording just 13 assists on 36 made field goals (36.1 percent), their worst team assist percentage this season.

They struggled to get easy baskets all series, with three of the games ranking among their worst assist percentage games of the season.

Additionally, the Carmelo Anthony/Amare Stoudemire project continues to produce mixed results.

In the past 2 seasons, including the playoffs, the Knicks have gone just 31-40 with both Anthony and Stoudemire in the lineup, including 1-7 in the postseason. When it's just been Stoudemire, the Knicks are a .500 team; they're 13-7 in games where just Anthony has been in the lineup.

Helping expedite the Knicks' playoff exit was LeBron James, who led the Heat with 29 points, eight rebounds and seven assists in Game 5. James improved to 7-0 all-time in first-round playoff series.

James inched his scoring average in potential series clinchers up to 28.3, the fifth-best mark in NBA history (minimum 10 games).

Awaiting the Heat are the Indiana Pacers, against whom the Heat had success, taking three of four regular-season meetings. Indiana struggled offensively in those games, averaging 92.3 points in the four games, shooting 40.4 percent from the field.

The Heat and Pacers have met just one other time in the playoffs: the 2004 Eastern Conference Semifinals, which the Pacers won in six games.

In recording their 12th straight playoff loss - tying the NBA record set by the Memphis Grizzlies from 2004 to 2006 - the New York Knicks couldn't match the assists of the Miami Heat and got burned by the Heat inside.

The Knicks had just 15 assists on their 38 field goals, a rate of 39.5 percent. That's their second-lowest assist percentage in a game this season, behind only 36.8 percent on April 3 at the Indiana Pacers.

The Heat made the same number of field goals on Monday, but assisted on 28 of them (73.7 percent).

Meanwhile, LeBron James was 6-6 and Dwyane Wade was 7-9 when shooting inside 5 feet of the basket in Game 2 against the Knicks. As a team the Heat shot 80 percent from such distances, tying their second-best rate of the season.

For the series, the Knicks have actually taken 15 more field goal attempts than the Heat inside 5 feet of the basket. But the Knicks are shooting just 55.3 percent on such attempts while the Heat are shooting 71.9 percent.

After a slow start in Game 1, Carmelo Anthony got off to a hotter start but that wasn't enough to change his team's finish. Anthony made his first two field goal attempts of Game 2, both within the first three minutes of the game. In Game 1, Anthony didn't make his first field goal until 2:06 of the second quarter - and didn't make his second until 7:46 of the third quarter.

He finished with 30 points, the 15th time in his playoff career that Anthony scored at least 30 points. But his team has a 6-9 record in those games.

One thing to keep an eye on in this series is the free throw discrepency. Through the first seven quarters of the Knicks-Heat series, LeBron James had taken 21 free throws. The entire Knicks team had taken 23. In that span, the Heat took 33 more free throws than the Knicks.

The Knicks averaged 24.8 free throw attempts per game in the regular season, but are averaging just 15 in the first two games against the Heat. Just three players have gotten to the line, and all but one free throw was attempted by either Anthony or Amar'e Stoudemire. Tyson Chandler (and his one free--throw attempt) is the only other Knicks player to shoot a free throw.

The Heat have taken twice as many free throws in the series, with eight players attempting at least one free throw.

Do fans have to be online using tools like Twitter in order to get the full NBA experience? To put this theory to the test, the writer went on a three week TwitterFast -- no active tweeting and no passive lurking on Twitter, even for potential assignments -- to see whether NBA fandom now relies upon the ubiquitous 140 character platform:




About a month ago, I realized I had a problem. Dwight Howard and the Knicks soap opera were dominating headlines in the run-up to the trade deadline, and I was nailed to my Twitter timeline, gleefully snarking on every rumor and piece of misinformation I could get my grubby hands on. Hours at a time of trying to be the first person to the clever joke, of checking every few seconds to see who had mentioned or retweeted me. After reading this thoughtful piece on the way Twitter’s addictive allure has changed NBA coverage forever, I realized a needed a break. So I signed off for three weeks.

The idea was to see whether I could keep abreast of NBA news, and to see whether I could fix the 140 character-sized leak in my consciousness. For years, I’d been a conscientious objector to the Twitter phenomenon, lording my refusal to shout into the echo chamber over the iPhone-affixed plebeians, but in the year or so I’d been tweeting I’d taken to it with the zeal of the convert. At first, I’d grudgingly acquiesced to Twitter as a way to publicize posts I’d written, but as time went by, I found myself more and more ensnared. So constant a presence did my timeline become, and so crucial a means of finding information, that I was no longer sure I could follow the league -- or any of my other interests really -- without it.

As it turns out, my fears were well-founded: During my three weeks away from Twitter, I found it almost impossible to feel connected to the flow of the NBA season. Whether it was news I was hearing late, or pieces by other bloggers I was missing, I discovered that my isolation made me less interested in watching actual games. Because Twitter so effectively organizes masses of information into a narrative or conversational thread, it had become the context that lent meaning to NBA contests. I enjoy individual games, but I found their significance somewhat diminished along with my ability to treat them as plot points in a broader ongoing story.

I want to stop here and think about this for a minute. I’ve heard people talk about the power of Twitter as a community-builder, a way to sit and watch games with friends, but it had never occurred to me that Twitter was making the product of the games themselves more enjoyable. In fact, I’d come to think of tweeting during games as a distraction, and on the nights when I needed to do it for an assignment I treated it warily. But once I was off Twitter, I realized that what it allows members to do is experience the game all day long. The drama of playoff implications, the excitement of surging teams -- these things didn’t have to be confined to the time between tip-off and the final horn. Being on Twitter makes an evening game into a daylong pageant with the match itself as a keystone event.

I also noticed during my hiatus that Twitter focuses my internet usage somewhat. It’s like an RSS feed, in some ways, in that it allows me to keep track of what I want to while letting me ignore a lot of the other stuff. Without it, I spent a lot of time clicking on the “related articles” sidebar on Gawker, a pastime which can quickly render the internet a warped vortex of progressively more twisted time-wasting, bending space, time and meaning into a Dadaist swirl where the only reality is the lost four hours I have spent finding things out about Michael Lohan.

Still, though, I do have reservations about my Twitter usage. It used to be regular Puritan condescension, my inner Franzen hectoring me that Twitter was fundamentally unserious or antithetical to long-form thought. I have gotten over that hang-up, mostly, but I do realize how thoroughly shot my attention span has become since I started using Twitter. I’ve found the past few weeks that I’ve developed a tendency to barely read things online; if I do click on links to long-form pieces, I usually scan them, leave them open in a tab, and forget about them while I move on to faster-paced delivery methods. Further, it is definitely true that I often have to re-watch games I want to analyze if I’d tweeted my way through them. As much as I want it not to be the case, I have become afflicted with a Twitterized brain.

A large part of the reason that I think Twitter has this hold over me is that it quantifies my communication and gives me all sorts meaningless little numerical benchmarks by which to measure my experience. Followers. Re-tweets. Mentions. Dozens of times a minute, I can check and see whether all the cool kids think my joke is funny, or whether I have increased my profile. I spend a truly pathetic amount of time checking the “@connect” button. These little benchmarks that Twitter has given it a stimulus-response element that the blinking cursor in my Word screen just can’t match. Where’s the thrill in reading one page when I could get one hundred more followers with a joke about how Erick Dampier looks like a Megazord of the Wayans brothers? (@dmnowell if you liked that one ... please?)

The biggest thing that the past three weeks have done for me is to make me realize what a powerful tool Twitter is, and also how much it has affected the way I process my world. As an NBA community member, I rightfully love Twitter for the way it keeps me connected to the game like nothing else. As a reader and writer, though, it has given me something like mental high cholesterol, a condition I need to manage if I’m going to be able to stay in any kind of shape.

In the end, I’m back on Twitter, and I’m excited to reclaim its benefits. I will, however, be experimenting with ways to limit my exposure. I think that the healthiest way will be to allow myself to either be fully on Twitter or fully off -- no leaving it open while I write or do other things, but perhaps for the three hours a day I’m going through other bloggers’ work or watching game footage. I need to find some balance between the problems Twitter poses my productivity and the benefits it provides me -- I need to carve out a relationship that is less compulsive and more utilitarian. This is easier said than done, of course, and I’m only cautiously optimistic, because to borrow an axiom, once on Twitter, always an addict.

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You can follow Danny Nowell on Twitter at your own risk at @dmnowell.

The Heat and Lakers both emerged victorious Sunday afternoon, as Miami clinched the Southeast Division, and Los Angeles moved a game and a half ahead of the Clippers in the Pacific Division.

The Heat relied on their Big Three, and the Lakers leaned on their two bigs, as we learn from diving into the numbers...

Heat 93, Knicks 85
Miami snapped New York's nine-game home win streak, thanks to a combined 73 points from the trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Those three scored 78.5 percent of the Heat's points, their highest percentage in a Miami win this season. With 16 points and 14 rebounds, Bosh recorded his first double-double and second double-digit rebounding game since the All-Star break.

Carmelo Anthony kept the game close with 42 points, the most any player has scored against the Heat this season.

But Anthony got little help from the other Knicks starters, who combined for 19 points. This was the first time since the NBA-ABA merger that the Knicks had a player score 40 or more points with no other starter reaching double figures.

Carmelo Anthony scored 26 of his 42 points on isolation plays, his most points on such plays this season and the most allowed by the Heat.

Lakers 112, Mavericks 108 (OT)Los Angeles improved to 4-1 without Kobe Bryant this season, in large part because of two Pau Gasol three-pointers in overtime. This is the first time Gasol has made two or more treys in a game for the Lakers. He previously did it twice with the Grizzlies, most recently over five years ago in December 2006.

The Lakers have won six straight versus Dallas, and they swept the four-game season series from the Mavericks. The Elias Sports Bureau tells us that the last time a team won all four games of a season series against the defending champion was five years ago, when the Magic swept the Heat.

Since the Mavericks eliminated Los Angeles in four games in last season's Western Conference Semifinals, it's also the fourth time ever that a team swept the season series against the same team that swept them the previous postseason.

Gasol finished with 20 points and 10 rebounds, and Andrew Bynum had 23 points and 16 boards, marking the third time this season they each posted 20 and 10 in the same game.

The Mavericks lost despite scoring 108 points, ending their 18-game win streak when scoring 100 or more points.

Mike D'Antoni resigned as coach of the New York Knicks on Wednesday. His agent Warren LeGarie says the parting was "a mutual decision" because D'Antoni and the team have "conflicting views of the Knicks' future."

What’s certain is that the recent past hasn’t been pretty for all parties involved.

After starting last season 28-26, the acquisition of Carmelo Anthony raised expectations in the Big Apple as the Knicks were supposed to join the Eastern Conference elite. Instead, New York went the opposite direction losing 38 of 70 games since. The Knicks scoring has gone down by almost six points per game since that fateful trade.

‘MELO DRAMA
The major crisis that ended the coach’s tenure is not a secret. New York has just been better with its superstar on the bench, especially this season with new point guard Jeremy Lin on the floor.

Since his return from injury 10 games ago, the Knicks are scoring 12 more points per 100 possessions and allowing 12 fewer points with Anthony on the bench.

But Lin or no Lin, Anthony simply wasn’t thriving in Mike D'Antoni's system.

Anthony is in the midst of one of his worst offensive seasons of his nine-year career. He’s shooting a career-worst 40 percent from the field. His 21.3 scoring average is his lowest since his sophomore season with the Nuggets.

Over the last 10 games, no two-man combo for the Knicks has put up a worse plus/minus rating than their two stars: Anthony and Amare Stoudemire. Anthony has put up a minus rating with every Knick he's played with over that time.

The best combo for the Knicks over last 10 games? Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak (+28).

The best combo for the Knicks this season? Jeremy Lin and Steve Novak (+122).

New interim head coach Mike Woodson will now have to figure that riddle out.

MISSING NASH
The entire drama in New York highlights a stark comparison for D'Antoni’s career. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, D'Antoni’s career win percentage is .733 in games he's coached when Steve Nash played for him. In games without him, he’s recorded just a .385 win percentage.

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE
The Knicks, who won seven straight games in February, have now dropped six in a row entering tonight's contest with Portland. With a defeat tonight, they would become the first NBA team since 2004 to have both a winning streak and a losing streak of at least seven games within a 20-game span (fact courtesy of Elias).

After winning 60 games and the top seed in the East, the 1992-93 Knicks were still underdogs when they met the two-time defending champion Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals. New York guard John Starks had been an underdog his entire improbable career, but found himself with the ball and a chance to take a commanding 2-0 series lead over the champs.

With 50 seconds left in Game 2, Starks dribbled on the right wing as Patrick Ewing rushed over to set a screen intended to spring Starks into the middle of the court. But instead of using the screen, Starks hesitated, feinted middle then exploded into the wide open space along the baseline. Bulls forward Horace Grant rotated to meet him outside the paint but arrived a step late. Starks gathered off of two feet and rocketed into the rafters of Madison Square Garden to deliver a violent left-handed flush that dislodged Grant’s goggles and the sanity of Knicks fans everywhere. For good measure, Michael Jordan appeared in the poster to futilely swipe at the ball as Starks flew by.

Nothing and everything made sense; Starks was up, Jordan was down. The rim-rattling dunk shook the basketball world to its core.

Over on the New York bench, a young assistant was startled -- not by the outrageous dunk, but by a strange mutation in Chicago’s pick-and-roll defense. What Jeff Van Gundy saw on that play would change the series, and inform the evolution of NBA defense over the next 20 years.

“That was the first time, late in the fourth quarter, that I had ever seen in the NBA any team force the ball to the baseline in the side pick-and-roll,” says Van Gundy.

“I know they weren’t well-coordinated and that’s what led to that dunk, but I think it turned the series around for them.”

The Bulls' defense had adapted right in front of the world and almost no one noticed. Though the adjustment led to an iconic moment for their opponents, the Bulls continued to use this new coverage on side pick-and-rolls to dismantle the Knicks, and particularly Starks, who averaged more than six turnovers in four straight losses while his scoring and assist averages plummeted.

NBA defenses built off of this moment over the next 20 years, and today’s Chicago Bulls, coached by defensive genius Tom Thibodeau, are the finest example how this simple idea has evolved into a devastating strategy for defending pick-and-rolls.

On every pick-and-roll, the Bulls send the ball handler away from the middle of the court. On side pick-and-rolls, that means forcing the ball down to the baseline, where the offense’s options quickly diminish.

A detailed examination of the Bulls' pick-and-roll philosophy gets pretty granular pretty quickly, but the guiding principle is dictating where the ball handler can go -- or more fundamentally, can’t go -- and loading up the help defense accordingly.

Against Starks and the 1993 Knicks, Horace Grant was a step or two late. But today’s Bulls, aided by altered illegal defense rules that allow for Thibodeau’s signature strong side zone defense, are virtually always on time.

The history of NBA strategy is a conversation, or argument, between styles. Chuck Daly’s Bad Boy Pistons were a response to Pat Riley’s Showtime Lakers. While Thibodeau, then an assistant with Van Gundy in Houston, was designing defenses to chew up pick-and-rolls, current Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni’s spread pick-and-roll offense provided the counterargument.

The goal of Thibodeau’s pick-and-roll coverages is to “keep the ball on the strong side to limit how much the weak side has to help and protect, so you’re not getting caught up in long rotations,” according to Van Gundy.

Not coincidentally, those long rotations and closeouts are precisely what D’Antoni’s offense is designed to create. In fact, Van Gundy credits the system D’Antoni developed in Phoenix with helping to advance defensive schemes around the league: “The high pick-and-roll with Phoenix with four shooters and Stoudemire rolling to the rim made it so you couldn’t show,” meaning the help-and-recover schemes teams had been using for years simply weren’t tight enough to prevent Phoenix, with their extra shooter (the now endemic Stretch Big Man) from getting wide open looks.

At its maddening best, D’Antoni’s offense generates wide swaths of space around the paint by stationing three shooters around a pick-and-roll involving a dynamic ball handler and an aggressively rolling big man.

During New York's magical seven-game winning streak in February, Jeremy Lin, Tyson Chandler and sweet-shooting Steve Novak perfectly embodied these roles. Not pictured: Carmelo Anthony and (for the most part) Amare Stoudemire.

But since returning their full complement of players, the Knicks have struggled, winning just three of their last 11 games. It comes as no surprise that the Knicks are also running far fewer pick-and-rolls.

The outlook is gloomy in Gotham, but remember that Euro-influenced drive-and-kick offenses that spread the floor with multiple attacking wings has historically been as successful as any against Thibodeau defenses. The Orlando Magic bounced the Celtics from the 2009 playoffs (while Thibodeau was the defensive assistant) with that strategy, and the Knicks have enough versatile scorers to exploit the Bulls' defensive rotations.

But to do that, to overcome Chicago’s strong-side pressure, the Knicks must adhere to the space and movement principals of D’Antoni’s system. They must keep the ball whipping around the perimeter, with either the dribble or the pass. Holding the ball, even to fake, and even when the fake is effective, only allows Chicago’s help defenders time to get in position.

This is one of the few NBA games in which the name on the front of the jersey matters nearly as much as those on the back. There's a historical backdrop of bad blood, but tonight also puts a fine point on a broader philosophical conversation between D’Antoni's spread offense, at its best the most productive system yet developed, and Thibodeau’s league-leading defense.

The echo from that roaring Starks dunk along the baseline can be heard throughout this game, in the howls of its passionate fans, and the tactical grappling of its coaches and players.

Fueled by the play of second-year point guard Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks went 8-1 from Feb. 4-19, and got back to .500 for the first time since Jan. 15.

Since then, the Knicks have dropped five of their last seven and at 18-21, are three games below .500 for the first time since Feb. 10.

In the last seven games, the Knicks have struggled establishing their pick and roll offense -- something they executed very well when winning eight of nine games.

From Feb. 4-19, New York ran pick-and-roll plays 18.7 percent of the time. That also allowed the Knicks to get away from running an isolation-dominated offense (14.7 percent of the plays) which had made up the most of their ball-handling plays this season. In their last seven games, the Knicks’ pick-and-roll percent has dropped to 12.1, despite their points per play in that offense increasing from 0.67 to 0.75.

In the meantime, the percent of their isolation plays has gone up to 15.3 percent, which also happens to coincide with the return of Baron Davis and Carmelo Anthony. This season, Davis and Anthony rank first and second, respectively, in the NBA in percentage of isolation plays.

Lin less effective in pick and roll
Lin’s breakout performance came against the New Jersey Nets on Feb. 4, scoring 25 points off the bench. Lin averaged 25.0 points on 50.9 percent shooting when the Knicks won eight of nine games. Since then, Lin’s overall production has decreased. In the last seven games, Lin has shot just 38.5 percent, and his scoring has dropped to 16.1 points per game.

Lin also has seen his pick-and-roll production decrease, averaging just 6.9 points on 36.8 percent shooting on such plays in the last seven games. When the Knicks went 8-1, Lin averaged 9.3 points and shot 44.1 from the field running the pick and roll.

Lin and the Knicks’ inability to run the pick-and-roll in the last seven games has prevented the point guard from scoring in the paint. After averaging 12.0 points in the paint and shooting 54 percent from Feb. 4-19, Lin has averaged 7.4 points on 42.6 percent shooting in the paint in his last seven games.

One month ago, on Jan. 21, the Knicks had lost five straight games heading into a Saturday matchup with the Nuggets. Razor thin, hobbled and without a true point guard at the helm, most believed the showdown would come to be a judgment of sorts on Carmelo Anthony and his long snake-bitten franchise. Jim Cavan, a writer for TrueHoop affiliate KnickerBlogger, covered the game.

More than anything, it felt like I was headed to an execution.

Losers of five straight, the Knicks’ already fragile, lockout-shortened season had -- by late January -- morphed into a dire downward spiral. Weeks away from the most unlikely of athletic ascensions, hope had given way to Hell in the Garden. As such, their Jan. 21 showdown with the Nuggets had assumed a level of intrigue at odds with your run of the mill, dead-of-winter, cross-conference NBA game.

Nearly a full year on from one of the most drawn-out and controversial trade operas in recent memory, the combination of Denver’s endearingly scrappy success (29-12 since the Melo trade, at that point) and the Knicks’ mesmerizing struggles had suddenly transformed the meeting into something resembling a capital punishment trial. Seldom purveyors of patience and perspective, Knicks fans, if they couldn’t get a W, would likely settle for heads.

For perhaps the first time in his eight-year career, Carmelo Anthony -- on this stage, anyway -- was the defense. He asked for this. He was the one who forced his way to Manhattan. Some would say clumsily, given the depth and flexibility sacrificed and square-peg-to-round-hole logic of pairing two stars so redundant in both beauty and moles. Now, facing the team that had so seamlessly moved on from the era Melo in effect defined, the chickens were coming home to roost -- one, seven-foot rooster (Danilo Gallinari) in particular.

I’d attempted more than a few mettle-mauling seven-hour drives into the city (it’s supposed to take four and a half) over the preceding few months, so this time I decided to drive to New Haven and take the train in from there. Even though I was coming from New Hampshire, making the 3:50 train -- slated to arrive at 45th Street a little after 5:30 -- was a given, near blizzard conditions be damned.

But, as with the Knicks themselves, even the best-laid plans often end poorly, albeit predictably so: An accident outside of Worcester on I-495 -- and the subsequent two hour, cigarette-heavy delay -- made me 10 minutes late for the 4:50. I had no choice but to hop the 5:50, which would put me into Grand Central right around tip-off. Sandwich angrily inhaled, I bided some time with my editor, KnickerBlogger founder Mike Kurylo, wondering over the phone whether being late to pick up my credentials would be grounds for refusal of entrance. He laughed.

I was going to watch the Knicks. Why would anything go right?

With the train docked -- on time for most, sickeningly late to one -- I double-timed it through the ice-packed Manhattan streets to the MSG media entrance along 8th Avenue. Now inside, the press pass gatekeeper held the lone remaining credential -- mine, and my first ever -- aloft the way a marathon volunteer would hoist a lukewarm cup of water for the guy in dead last. Wielding it like a cross between an FBI badge and a firearm, I blew past half a dozen ushers and security guards until I found myself directly behind the first section of courtside seats.

Mired in apoplectic rage for most of the last five hours, I stopped to absorb the moment. I’d been to my fair share of NBA games. But I’d never been so close to the squeaking shoes, the sweat, the voices and movements and flailing limbs. Like a child, I stood there motionless, mouth agape and mind fast-forwarding through endless hours of memory tape, while the stage, flush with ghosts and footprints, played its act. In the 90 seconds before security politely asked me to escort myself up to the 300-level press box, I felt closer to a genuine meditative state than I ever have in any attempt at actual meditation -- a moment made all the more surreal by Bill Walker tossing eight of his 13 first-half points directly into what felt like my eyeballs.

I trudged up to find the northern press section, at this point mostly vacant. Before long, LoHud.com blogger extraordinaire J.R. O’Grady sought me out, promising he’d do his best to show a noob the ropes. KnickerBlogger hadn’t given me anything resembling a set assignment. As such, it was extremely difficult to pull back from a fan’s natural mechanics and focus on getting a story down.

The Knicks -- playing their fourth in five -- managed to stave off what many believed would be an inevitable blowout. But an ankle and wrist-hobbled Carmelo Anthony struggled, forcing the issue early and often, each ill-advised hoist kicking up the arena’s angst another couple decibels. Meanwhile, Gallinari was in full payback mode, which only added to the Garden’s already tense, uneasy atmosphere.

To someone who questioned the wisdom of the Melo trade as much as anyone, Gallo’s performance was equal parts lament-filled and maddening: “Where the hell was this the last three years?” I thought. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone. Everywhere you looked, jaded fans sported Gallo’s once omnipresent No. 8 with equal parts pride and nostalgic protest. Here he was, the 18-year-old kid D’Antoni had once called the greatest shooter he’d ever seen, assuming a degree of leadership and murderous instinct once enjoyed only in flashes.

Regulation gave way to overtime, and overtime to a second. The Knicks' offense -- its lack of consistent point guard play by now a fatal flaw -- was putting up points almost in spite of itself. Noticeably drained, the ‘Bockers eventually succumbed. Anthony would finish with 25 points on 30 noticeably pained chucks. The crowd, eager for a scapegoat, had $80 million of them wearing No. 7. In contrast, Gallo, in perhaps the finest overall performance of his young career, poured in a career-high 37 on 19 shots, to go along with 11 rebounds.

The trial was complete; the judgment laid down in persistent boos. The 20,000-strong jury marched down and out and into the streets and subways, while O’Grady and I headed down to the lower press room, where stale brownies and sandwiches lined the foldout tables and reporters waited idly for Mike D’Antoni’s requisite Q&A. Never one for demonstrability, the Knicks coach -- recognizing as he must the heat beneath his seat -- answered the pointed questions, almost all of them relating to Anthony’s poor performance, in as measured a manner possible. Ditto the inconsistent defense; the poor shooting; the lack of true leadership. Really, it’s all he could do.

We dozen or so scribes filed towards the locker room, by then occupied by but two Knicks: Josh Harrellson -- whose third quarter wrist injury would result in the Knicks making the most fateful D-League call up in league history two days later -- and Carmelo Anthony. Naturally, all flocked to the Knicks’ supposed savior, seated in a slight hunch facing his locker, slowly peeling pieces of tape from wrist and ankle. For what felt like an hour, Melo said nothing.

Finally he stood, lower torso toweled, and cut through the confused mass towards the showers. Apparently, this kind of behavior was rather unusual, as it constituted most of the conversation in the lull before Tyson Chandler and Amare Stoudemire’s respective arrivals. Never ones for curls, my forearms and shoulders ached from holding the voice recorder over the mass of heads, a string of platitudes -- some expected, some candid -- ringing forth from both.

We’ll figure it out. I refuse to be part of a losing team. We’ll get ‘em next time. We just need more time.

Anthony eventually returned to dole out a string of confessions -- Am I shooting too much? Am I doing something wrong? Am I not being a leader? -- theretofore unspoken. Maybe he’s finally getting it, we all thought. Which says more about the state of the team that weekend than perhaps any of us were willing to admit -- that we’d been reduced to hanging hopes and prospects on words, and mere suggestions of change.

Nearly four decades removed from the last Knick title, the team seemed perhaps further adrift than it ever had from the ethos that anchored those teams: Play together, and find the open man. That was a team. This? This was a collection of 13 guys who, despite playing in a system more conducive to any to those halcyon principles, were far too often charting their course to one flawed, hazy star.

Afterwards, a few fellow Knicks writers met up with O’Grady and me at a nearby bar, where beer and bourbon turned bloggers briefly into GMs.

Shumpert’s just not a point guard, and I don’t even know if he should be starting.

We need Baron back, like, yesterday.

If Melo shoots 30 times in a game again, I might move to Brooklyn.

I knew it might be rough, but who thought it would be this rough?

That’s the third Bon Jovi song in the last 15 minutes.

Around 1:45 a.m. I made my way back to Grand Central with the aim of catching the next available train back to New Haven. The night’s events still had me fully wired -- why not use the 90 minutes ride back to get some words down, I thought. I knew there was a 2:10 train because I’d looked it up no less than an hour before. Since when does the Internet lie?

When I reached Grand Central’s 45th Street entrance, only to find its doors had closed mere minutes before, the day’s events hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt suddenly exhausted, no longer capable of dealing with failure of any kind. I’d failed getting to the game on time; my team had failed to ward off the ghosts of its own making; and I’d failed -- apparently -- to read Grand Central’s fine online print. I traced my steps back to a Holiday Inn Express, footed $100 for what would amount to a five-hour stay, trudged up to my room, opened the door, and collapsed on the bed. My right heel sore from so much walking, I removed my loafers, only to find the back of my right sock caked in blood. I took off the sock, hit the light, and passed out in less than five seconds -- the next five hours dreamless black.

Not long after Saturday’s demoralizing marathon, the Knicks put in a call to the Erie BayHawks. With Harrellson’s injury further thinning an already depleted squad, and determined to save their cap room for one of two China-stranded stars (J.R. Smith, ultimately) they needed reinforcements. Cheap ones. Jeremy Lin -- fresh off a triple-double in his first and only D-League start, undrafted the year before and cast aside by both the Warriors and Rockets in the interim -- would have to be that.

Sunday morning, showered but hardly clean, I limped back to Grand Central in time to catch the 10:07 back to New Haven. Seated facing backward, we ascended North through the city, past Midtown and Harlem and eventually out of Manhattan. As the train slowly gained speed, that unique feeling of reverse acceleration -- a kind of horizontal rapture through man’s concrete idols -- struck me as apt: Like the Knicks, I was moving faster and faster in what felt like the wrong direction.

Like the Knicks, I sensed the gravity of the city dissipating, its pull and passion fading; my hope for timely arrival had given way to that for simple survival.

Like the Knicks mere days later, I just hoped I bought the right ticket; that the train would take me where I needed to go.

Little did we know.

Follow Jim Cavan on Twitter at @JPCavan

Sunday was a day in which Kobe Bryant made like Magic Johnson and Rajon Rondo made like both Johnson and Larry Bird.

In the afternoon’s first game, Bryant hit the game-winning shot with 4.2 seconds remaining to give the Los Angeles Lakers a 94-92 win over the Toronto Raptors.

It was the 16th time that Bryant hit a game-winning shot in the final five seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime, since his career began in 1996-1997. That’s the most in the NBA in that span- two more than Carmelo Antony.

Rondo raised his game a level in a 95-91 win over the Chicago Bulls, with 32 points, 15 assists and 10 rebounds. A check of Basketball-Reference.com shows that he’s the fifth player with a 30-15-10 game since 1990, the other four being Johnson, Jason Kidd, Baron Davis, and LeBron James.

The last Celtic with a 30-15-10 game was Bird against the then-Washington Bullets in April, 1987.

The Boston Celtics have now allowed fewer than 100 points in 25 straight games. The Elias Sports Bureau notes that’s the longest single-season streak by any team since the 2004-05 Bulls (26 straight) and the seventh-longest streak in the shot-clock era, which dates to the 1954-55 season.

The NBA record is 36 straight games, set by the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons.

Elsewhere around the league the Miami Heat blew out the Atlanta Hawks, marking the sixth time this season, the Heat won by at least 20 points. Only the Bulls and Philadelphia 76ers have more blowout wins than Miami. However, the Sixers have been the on the receiving end of two of the Heat's routs.

LeBron James finished with 23 points, 13 rebounds and six assists for his 106th career-game with 20-10-5. Since 2003, his rookie season, James has the second-most such games behind Kevin Garnett.

Plus-Minus Note of the Night
Washington Wizards guard John Wall finished a +28 in a 98-77 win over the Detroit Pistons. It was the best plus-minus for Wall in his 97-game NBA career.

Expectations were high for the New York Knicks this season, with a full season of Carmelo Anthony, Amar’e Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler playing together.

But a little more than a month into the season, the Knicks sit at 7-11 and are 10th in the Eastern Conference, already five games behind the surprising Philadelphia 76ers in their division.

The Knicks are 21-25 since trading for Anthony. At the time of the trade last season, they were 28-26.

Meanwhile, in the Western Conference, the Denver Nuggets, the team that gave up Anthony, have gone 30-12 since the trade, the third-best record in the NBA behind the Chicago Bulls and Oklahoma City Thunder in that time.

The question now is where have the Knicks gone wrong?

Carmelo Trade a Mistake?
The Knicks are much the same team in terms of points allowed, points scored and field goal percentage before and after the Anthony trade over the past two seasons.

So it begs the question of whether trading for Anthony was a mistake, and if the Knicks would be better off with Danilo Gallinari.

This season, Gallinari ranks 10th in the NBA in Win Shares per 48 Minutes and his Player Efficiency Rating has risen from 15.7 to 21.2 this season.

Meanwhile, Anthony’s PER is a 20.8 this season, and his Effective Field Goal Percentage is 10.3 percent lower than Gallinari’s.

Overreliance on Isolation
This season, 15.8 percent of the Knicks offensive plays have come in isolation, the highest percentage in the NBA.

But the results haven’t been there, as, in isolation, the Knicks average 0.67 points per play, 25th best in the NBA, and shoot 30.3 percent, 29th in the NBA.

Two of the main culprits have been the Knicks superstars, Anthony and Stoudemire. 101 players in the NBA have run at least 20 plays in isolation this season, and of those, Anthony ranks 79th in points per play (0.65) and Stoudemire 84th (0.62).

D’Antoni’s Offense Didn’t Travel
In his last four seasons with the Phoenix Suns, current Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni led the Suns to the best offensive efficiency in the NBA in each season.

However, that offense has yet to be discovered in New York.

In D’Antoni’s first two seasons with the Knicks, New York ranked 17th and 15th in offensive effiency. Last season, the Knicks were an impressive fifth, but this year, it’s slipped to a paltry 24th out of 30 teams.

Unfortunately, the same porous defense that plagued D’Antoni in Phoenix has traveled to New York.

The Suns were 16th or worse in defensive efficiency in D’Antoni’s last four years. In his first three years with the Knicks, they ranked outside the top 20 in all three years. This year, however, New York has just cracked the top 10, a tie for ninth.

The key to D’Antoni’s sparkling offense in Phoenix might not have been D’Antoni himself, but the players running the offense. In the first two seasons after D’Antoni left, the Suns still led the NBA in offensive efficiency, and their mark rose from 97.1 in D’Antoni’s last season to 111.2 the next season.

KNICKS MAKE IT A NICKEL
The Milwaukee Bucks beat the New York Knicks who have now lost five straight games and stand at 6-9. Although Carmelo Anthony scored 35 points in the loss, the Knicks now stand at just 20-21 since trading for him last February.

A trend of leaning on Anthony in isolation continued against Milwaukee, as Anthony accounted for 15 of the Knicks’ 19 plays in isolation. On the season, the Knicks have ran a higher percentage of isolation plays than any other team, but are shooting just 29.3 percent on such plays, the worst in the NBA.

Brandon Jennings scored a season-high 36 points in the win, but did so without attempting a single free throw. He is the first player to score at least that many points without attempting a free throw since Jason Richardson in January 2008. Two of the three highest scoring games of his career have now come at Madison Square Garden, having hung 37 on March 25 of last season.

HOWARD SHOULDERS THE LOAD
Dwight Howard had 21 points and 23 rebounds to lead the Orlando Magic over the Los Angeles Lakers 92-80. It was Howard’s fifth game with at least 20 points and 20 rebounds this season, more than the rest of the NBA combined. According to Elias, Howard is the first player since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1975-76 with at least 20 points and 20 rebounds in five of his team’s first 15 games of the season.

Although Kobe Bryant scored 30 points, the Lakers offense continues to struggle as they failed to top 100 points for the 10th straight game. That is tied for the second-longest such streak by the Lakers in the shot-clock era (since 1954-55).

BULLS WIN WITHOUT ROSE
Despite playing without Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls won 114-75, handing the Cleveland Cavaliers their worst home loss in franchise history. According to Elias, the 39-point margin of victory is the second-largest ever by the Bulls over the Cavaliers, trailing only a 121-80 result on December 22, 1970.

Chicago held Cleveland to just 30.3 percent shooting, the fifth-lowest allowed in a game this season. It was the fifth time this season the Bulls have held their opponent to under 35 percent shooting. The Lakers are the only other team with even three such games this season.

AROUND THE ASSOCIATION
• The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Atlanta Hawks 90-76 to improve to 11-4, their best start since starting 11-4 in 2002-03.

• LaMarcus Aldrige had 33 points, 23 rebounds and five assists to lead the Portland Trail Blazers over the Toronto Raptors. He is only the sixth player in the last 25 seasons to reach those threshold in a single game and the first to do it since Kevin Garnett in 2003-04.

• The Detroit Pistons scored 81 points in a loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. It’s Pistons’ 16th straight game they have failed to score 100 points, their third-longest such streak in the shot-clock era.

Things don't look much different from last season for the Chicago Bulls, who rolled to a win over the Orlando Magic on Friday, with perhaps one subtle exception.

Since the start of last season, the Bulls are now 29-11 against teams that are .500 or better. That’s the best mark against such teams in the NBA.

One much-discussed trend evident from Chicago’s strong start is Derrick Rose’s evolution into becoming more of a pass-first player (he had 10 more assists in Friday’s win).

The proof of this can be seen in video review of situations in which he is the ballhandler on a pick-and-roll play.

Rose has increased the rate at which he’ll pass on pick-and-roll plays in the early part of the season. Last season, he did so slightly less than half of the time of the time.

This season, he’s done so slightly more often, and with greater success, as noted in the chart on the right.

One extra time per game of choosing to pass rather than shoot has led to good results so far. He had four of his 10 assists on pick-and-rolls in Friday’s win.

That said, Rose’s high assist total early this season is actually almost a near match for what he did in the first eight games last season, when he registered 76 assists. It will be worth watching to see if his pass-first ways continue.

Elsewhere in the NBA

Golden Nuggets

The Denver Nuggets won again, beating the New Orleans Hornets, 96-88 to improve to 6-2. Denver is playing at the fastest pace in the league, registering upwards of 100 possessions per game and averaging the most fast-break points per game (24.3).

But what stat is most shocking? They rank first in the NBA in defensive efficiency, allowing 92 points allowed per 100 possessions.

A Night To Forget for Pierce
On a night in which the Boston Celtics were held to just 25 first-half points (their-worst output, via Elias, since 1995), Paul Pierce was just 3-for-17 from the field.

It was just the second game in Pierce's career in which he made that few shots in that many attempts.

Pierce was 3-for-19 in a Celtics loss at the Charlotte Hornets on April Fool's Day in 2001.

Spreading the Love Around
In a 98-87 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love had 29 points and 14 rebounds.

Love is the first to have at least 20 points and 12 rebounds in his team's first seven games since 1975 (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- 10 straight).

Plus-Minus Stat of the Night
Carmelo Anthony starred for the New York Knicks with 37 points, but fan-favorite guard Iman Shumpert made an impact again.

The Knicks outscored the Washington Wizards by 20 points in Shumpert’s 37 minutes on the floor on Friday. They were outscored by 17 points in the 11 minutes in which he was on the bench.

Anthony, by the way, has 204 points through the Knicks first seven games. According to Elias, only one Knicks player had more points in that many games—Bernard King with 228 in 1984-1985.

On Wednesday, the New York Knicks dropped a game to the Charlotte Bobcats, 118-110, to drop to 2-4 on the season and now sit four games back of the Miami Heat atop the Eastern Conference.

Three areas stand out for reasons for the Knicks’ early-season struggles.

Tyson Chandler: Not Helping?
The Knicks acquired Tyson Chandler to help their defense. Unfortunately, not only has the team performed better on defense when Chandler is not on the floor, he’s also had a depressing performance on the team’s offense. The Knicks put up a better points per 100 possessions, both offensively and defensively, when Chandler is not in the game.

If we look at it from a broader perspective, the Knicks’ overall numbers have not improved, either.

Two areas in which one would expect Chandler to have a significant impact would include, naturally, points allowed as well as rebound rate. The Knicks have not improved relative to the league in either of those categories. They've dropped from 21st to 23rd in the league in defensive efficiency, and have remained 28th in rebound rate.

Carmelo Anthony: Not a Savior?
Presumably, one of the reasons the Knicks went out and acquired Carmelo Anthony was because they viewed him as a franchise cornerstone, difference-maker type player. While no one doubts his scoring prowess, it’s fair to question whether he has a tangible impact on a team’s ability to win games.

Over the last two seasons, the Knicks are two games over .500 before acquiring Anthony, and two games under after Anthony became a Knick. Their points scored, allowed and field goal percentage are virtually the same before and after Anthony.

The Denver Nuggets, on the other hand, are 23-9 since trading Carmelo Anthony, after sitting at 32-25 last season before trading their superstar. Only the Bulls have a better record since Feb. 22, 2011, the date of the trade.

Amar'e Stoudemire: Hurt by Point Guards?
Amar’e Stoudemire predates both Chandler and Anthony in New York, but it appears he’s being hurt by point guard play that has dropped off since last season.

With Toney Douglas this season, Stoudemire is averaging 5.3 shots in the restricted zone per 36 minutes. Last season, with Raymond Felton on the floor, Stoudemire was averaging 7.2 of those shots per 36 minutes.

His scoring, field goal percentage and free throw attempts per game have also dropped off this season with Douglas on the floor compared to his numbers last season with Felton.

This has matched scouting reports, that Douglas is more of a scoring point guard who may have trouble setting up teammates.

NBA Playbook's new editor Brett Koremenos was awfully impressed by Carmelo Anthony's nuanced and "ruthlessly efficient" pick-and-roll game and has video to illustrate how Anthony's size helps him spot passing windows when the defense traps or hedges. What's more, Anthony made sharp reads against one of the league's very best pick-and-roll defenses. How good can the Knicks offense become if Anthony embraces his inner Hedo Turkoglu?

The unknown factors in the Chris Paul trade saga remain a mystery. Smart people are still asking the right questions, but we still don't know what governed the decision to veto a three-way trade between the Hornets, Lakers and Rockets, then sign off on a package from the Clippers.

We don't know to what extent that first deal was agreed upon by front office principals in New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles. We don't know whether the subsequent rejection of that trade for "basketball reasons" was just that -- a statement about the contents of the package, or whether the league had ulterior motives like throwing a bone to a segment of owners or listening to the wishes of a potential buyer.

What few have asked is why the Hornets felt the dire need to trade Chris Paul in the first place, a question Mavericks owner Mark Cuban addressed over the weekend in an interview with TMZ:

[W]e went through a long lockout, and one of the things we were trying to gain was that small-market teams could have confidence they could keep their star players ... There would be enough financial incentives for them to stay with the incumbent team. And within two weeks of the new collective bargaining agreement, the smallest-market team, which is owned by the NBA, threw up their hands and said, ‘We can’t keep our star player.’ So it’s not about Chris Paul. It’s more about the fact that the NBA kind of gave up on the CBA before giving it a chance. And to me, that made them kind of hypocritical -- or very hypocritical -- which didn’t sit too well with me...

... We had a lockout. What was the purpose of the lockout? One of the goals of the lockout was to have more parity. With free agency, players are always allowed to choose wherever they want to go, but they have to make a decision. Do they want to stay with their existing teams and make the most money, or leave on their own terms to wherever they want to go with cap room and take less money? My personal belief is 90 percent of the time players are going to take the greater money, which meant that Chris Paul could've, would've -- or any star player could've, would've -- wanted to stay in the smaller market. And you’ve got other teams that are making that conscious decision to stick it out like Orlando is doing. But of all the teams not sticking it out, you would think the team owned by the NBA and run by the commissioner would be the first to stick it out, and they weren’t. And to me, it’s hypocritical, and threw a lot of us under the bus.

Cuban argues that a team owned by the NBA should've been faithful to the spirit of a collective bargaining agreement that makes superstars choose between destination and treasure. Had Chris Paul opted out of the final year of his contract with New Orleans and chosen the Lakers, then so be it. Paul would've had to settle for only $75.8 million over four seasons rather than the $100.2 million over five seasons he could've earned only with the Hornets.

Critics of Cuban's argument would say that an unwillingness to trade Paul could mean the Hornets would be stuck with nothing in return.

But is nothing really so bad?

Wasn't the initial proposal -- which would've netted the Hornets Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Lamar Odom and Goran Dragic -- rejected because it would've made the Hornets too competitive? The Hornets would've been consigned to the NBA's middle class, not competitive enough to win anything meaningful, but not bad enough to secure a future superstar with a high draft pick. While treading water, the Hornets would be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars, even if those contracts are of relatively fair value, which they are.

In contrast, the Clippers delivered a likely Top 10 pick, along with an expiring deal for an All-Star center, a prolific young scorer and a forward prospect. Nevermind that the center won't be around next season, the scorer might not want to stick around and the prospect may or may not amount to anything. In fact, for teams in rebuilding mode, success presents serious problems. As Ethan Sherwood Strauss wrote last week at HoopSpeak, why pay to be competitive if you can tank for less?

Much of the appeal in this Clippers-Hornets trade is derived from how it makes the Hornets immediately, well, bad ... Obviously, Eric Gordon is a key get, but few observers believe he’ll take New Orleans to next year’s playoffs. And that’s the point. The Hornets will receive a high lottery selection to pair with Minnesota’s 2011 draft pick. A gutted team plus lotto hope makes for a more enticing situation than the playoff contention troika of Luis Scola, Lamar Odom, and Kevin Martin.

By shepherding this particular trade through, the commissioner is tacitly–maybe even overtly–singing a grand, bellowing ode to the glories of tanking. And he is quite correct, because ping pong balls determine so much.

This is why Orlando shouldn't worry too much about getting nothing in return for Howard -- and why New Orleans should flip Eric Gordon as soon as possible, lest he help them win 28 games and finish with the No. 9 or 10 pick.

Nuggets general manager Masai Ujiri deserves praise for engineering a strong deal when Carmelo Anthony declared he wanted out of Denver, but pull back for a second and consider what the future looks like for the Nuggets. Those nice assets accumulated in Anthony trade should, along with Nene, sentence the Nuggets to respectability. The team will be fun, likeable and utterly irrelevant on May 25, if not sooner. While the dregs of the league scout all the coveted incoming big men at the top of the draft board, Denver will troll the middle ranks of the first round.

It will be years before we can fairly judge whether the Nuggets would've been better off letting Anthony leave "for nothing," but if your goal is June basketball in Denver at the earliest possible moment, Top 5 picks and swaths of cap space for the foreseeable future might be preferable to Danilo Gallinari and a highly-compensated Nene, who is approaching 30. Nuggets fans won't have to cover their eyes, but they can probably forget about seeing tickets with holograms on them anytime soon.

When we learned last week of a Howard trade proposal that had Brook Lopez, Gerald Wallace, Jordan Farmar and a pick to Orlando, the early takeaway was that Orlando was getting the shaft. But the problem for Orlando wasn't that the deal was bad -- it's that it wasn't bad enough! The NBA is governed by a system that reserves its greatest rewards for abject failure, but tells teams striving to put a competitive product on the floor that it's wasting its time.

Think about the Houston Rockets for a second. While they had $40 million of annual salary tied up in two injured superstars, they continued to make wily deals, like offloading Rafer Alston for the Grizzlies' backup point guard, and stealing an Argentinian power forward from the Spurs for Vassilis Spanoulis. Kyle Lowry and Luis Scola have allowed the Rockets to remain competitive on a nightly basis -- and forever relegated to the middle of the first round of the NBA draft, where superstars are a once in a generation occurrence.

What do you do if you're the Rockets or the Hawks and have the talent in place to hang around the 45-win mark for the foreseeable future? Are you deluding yourself in a system with screwy disincentives and maddening inefficiencies? Are you better off conducting a fire sale and putting a sign at the arena gate apologizing for the mess while you remodel?

Mark Cuban is half right-half wrong. If the Hornets and/or the NBA made a mistake by dealing away Chris Paul, it isn't because they betrayed any tacit promise they owed to small-market owners (You want a promise? Get it in the form of a hard cap). It's because they acquired a player who has the potential to win basketball games and cost them lots of money next summer, two things that will work in opposition to getting atop the NBA draft board.

Orlando now finds itself in a similar situation with Howard. The two most desirable outcomes for the Magic are (1) figuring out how to retain Howard for the long term (2) putting themselves in the same position they were when they drafted Howard in 2004 -- 40 games under .500.

Offering him the most years at the most money is the only way to achieve No. 1. "Getting nothing in return for Howard" is the easiest way to get to No. 2.

But trading Howard for productive players is the sure-fire way to thwart both plans.